who is stupid?
 

Half of the country is mentally challenged. Is it the people who learned everything they know in third grade, or the people who are continuously integrating new information into their beliefs?

Let's see. Trans rights-- there are only two genders. I learned that in the third grade and it's good enough for me. World events-- the USA is good and infaillible. That's what they said in the third grade, why question it? Climate change-- it's probably real, but it's not a big deal and it won't change anything for a really long time. That's how it was in the third grade, and that's how it's always gonna be as far as I'm concerned.

The only people who question what they learned in third grade are the libtards who have liberalism, a mental disease. They don't know which bathroom to use because liberals are dumb, and they're socialists, and they're communists, and those things are bad. Because that's what they told me in third grade.

...

How the fuck do these people remember to breathe?

Ironically, I have to use a CPAP because when I'm asleep, I do forget to breathe.

Typical liberal. ;)

That mean old Flint, picking on the autonomically challenged.

Oof

i had typed up like, several paragraphs in response to this (very eloquent and clever, i swear) and then lost them so now im frustrated

but the short version: i would argue that its not a matter of "stupid". its a matter of scared.

people are watching the decline and collapse of the american empire - staggering inequality, stagnant wages and rising costs, selfish and unpredictable leadership, and just.. an overwhelming feeling that something is wrong.

a commie like me might argue that this is the profound alienation that is inevitable under late capitalism as the system consumes itself like a dying star, burning heavier and heavier elements until it blows, but most folks on the right-wing obviously aren't gonna agree there. And one easy answer that a lot of them believe instead is that, well, if things were good Back Then, we need to go back to the social structures of the imagined leave-it-to-beaver past, and, well, make america great again. Which means blaming the problems of the present not on systems or on the structures of capital that funnel resources and power to those with the most resources and power the begin with, but on the gays and the blacks and the feminists and the immigrants - all the people they don't think about when they picture that halcyon past. if we could just make society look more like it did when it was "great", things would be better.

i was reading somewhere recently about how the rise in cults and conspiracy theories in the late 70s and early 80s was a direct response to the cognitive dissonance of seeing failure in vietnam, gas rationing, recession, rising crime, etc, and having to reconcile that with the knowledge that America is great, that our system works. the solution provided by conspiracy theories was that its not our fault or the system's fault that things are bad, its the jews, or the lizard people (they mean jews), or the round earthers (they mean jews), or the illuminati (they mean jews), or its aliens (they mean jews..... they always mean jews, when it comes to conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals manipulating the world, because almost every single "mainstream" conspiracy theory is at its core anti-semitic nonsense), and its not hard to see the parallel in qanon bullshit. Most of the country, i think, agrees that this country has been in decline for years if not decades, and its so tempting to blame a conspiracy of evil globalist child traffickers that our savior leader is tirelessly working in secret to defeat, than admit the whole system is complicit or worse, broken.

i think the most common trait among the "mainstream" far-right republican populace isn't stupidity, or even hate, its unease. its feeling like something is wrong, fundamentally wrong, and not knowing what to do about it. and people who are worried like that, who can see the broken pieces of a system but can't bear to look at the system as a whole to see that it's broken all the way down, are very very easily convinced by arguments that the real problem is everyone else. that if we just make us great again, and realign ourselves to the values of an imagined halcyon past, we can stop feeling like things are so fucked up all the time.

(edit to add: and the thing is, like, 90% of this is just as true of democrats too. its just that instead of looking to the past, they think that if we can just reform a few bits of this around the edges, we could fix everything, if it weren't for The Other Side)
(second edit to add: and obviously not all of this is true about the rapidly growing far nazi edge of the right wing. they are also mostly not stupid, and are also obviously scared, but when your solution to that is the final one, when you just want a white ethnostate, you've moved a bit beyond this level of good-faith assumption. fascism is fundamentally capital's response to the struggles of late capitalism, but its loudest and most openly nazi proponents know that they are wrong, and prey on the former group to recruit. they go hand in hand - i pretty firmly believe its hard to have widespread fascism without having the sort of widespread social issues and sense of doom described above - but above i'm talking about the average folks who go along with fascism rather than those who knowingly seek to institute it, a distinction worth making before the formers become the latter)

Perhaps we can reach a compromise and say that people have been scared stupid.

Stress most definitely does make us stupid, so I'd sub stress in for scared. We (I) need to take more care.

...or take more drugs.

Flint: Did you just believe them when they told you that you didn't need to go on to fourth grade?
It seems to have simplified your life.

Ignorance can be fixed.
Stupid is forever.


There are both types of people at large in the world.

Stupid is what stupid does. It is a soundbite. So it must be true.

The soundbite is "Stupid is as stupid does."

Your version is just a soundnibble. Keep at it though and maybe someday it'll become bite-size.

You can never make a comment without being demeaning. Typical.

Worst case of psychological projection I ever saw.

Attachment 71224

Not stupid.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts...and-back-rerun

Your 30 second attention span is showing again.

That's just all you're worth.

That discussion demonstrated how easily a moderate can be enticed or even consumed by the dark side of the force.

The people who consider truth to vary with the fashion of the year...
...Leave me uncomfortable with their whims.

The people who kid themselves that they are maturing and growing, and vary with fashion thereby, are even worse. When they are moved to action, people without self-awareness commit great atrocities.

Flint, darling -- have you since third grade seen any good things come out of socialism and communism? I doubt you have, since third grade or any other grade.

I also doubt you've ever been past the borders of the United States. I have. This allowed me to see what's out there; to put boots on the ground on the soil of despotic countries.

Cuba, for instance, has the most Potëmkin healthcare system pesos can buy. Sufficient to hoodwink the likes of Michael Moore -- I'm too wise to view his movies, and I seek understanding elsewhere. Fact is, there isn't a nationalized healthcare system that's worth a damn -- it always turns to rationing of both care and death. Overreach much? You can lower taxes honestly by not overreaching at all. That is anathema to those with an appetite to rule. (Otherwise, they'd have to make do with HOA's.)

People spend their last bolivars for a bus ticket to the borders of Venezuela -- then get off the bus and hike across the border afoot, destitute -- into another third world country. They have some notion they could make a new start.

People defect away from socialism; those socialist countries are not as popular to break into as the capitalist, freemarket United States. I mind me of a guy I just randomly met in a quiet Paris café years before the Berlin Wall came down -- the waiter might have thought it was good to seat the foreigners together, or perhaps figured he could have just one table to clear when we were done with lunch. We got to chatting, in French. Turns out this guy was from East Germany and had slipped across some border or other into the Free World, without the blessing of law. So he broke out, not in. Which point he didn't mind mentioning in public in 1980s Paris.

It's not exactly an abstraction when you've discussed it with a living example.

Yet the path of moderate Social Democrats isn't being largely fled. Totalitarian states should be brought down or fled. Those who seek totalitarianism should be opposed early enough in their process to halt them. Understanding when one's truth serves the totalitarian's objectives is the difficulty.

Which is why -- critical thinking in play -- I bring down the ones that say to us, "Hell, yeah, we'll take your AR-15!" as the sine qua non of totalitarianism. Sure, they don't confess their totalitarianism -- but then, would you?

The last sentence in your post is... addled. "One's truth?" Keeping the AR-15 disserves the totalitarian's objectives.

Mighty few of you lot have genuinely found a totalitarian in The Annoying Orange -- he certainly does annoy some of the piggies in their starched white shirts -- as mighty few of you have bought AR-15s, or ammunition, or helmets -- or anything. You lot have for four years coddled your prejudices, and you've puled. That's not "resistance to totalitarianism." What it is is a big nothing.

Being the soul of nonprejudice, I walk a good path. And keep a rifle and something to feed it.

Did you know, the last time I fully supported the Democratic Presidential candidate, I was a third-grader? (LBJ, that was)

If your weapon serves a totalitarian mindset you are anti-freedom.

That would be true -- if. Mine does not -- it should be noted that totalitarians cannot and do not afford a Second Amendment. They'd die, shortening their careers dramatically. Despotisms live by disarming populations, not so?

Shortening is how we'd want it. I'm not here to steer you wrong either, Griff. You and me both keeping guns actively does much to prevent successful totalitarianism. And one of us can tell the other one he's being a slacker.

Sorry, should have said, IF half of the country is mentally challenged..
I don't need to make that supposition, our culture is steeped in it.

I overheard a co-worker using the phrase "let that sink in" --out loud, in a conversation.
Using the "meme language" that never convinced anybody of anything, to not convince some poor co-worker of something.

I don't need to tell you half of the country is stupid, it' the entire basis of our politics.
But IF half of us are stupid, there has to be some criteria for determining which half it is, right?

Keep posting, please. Your thoughts are interesting. I don't go on social media or listen to any form of news anymore, so it's nice to see some fresh content.

Absolutely